That one jacket John Abraham wears in the second half of Mumbai Saga, the beige leather thing with the weird diagonal zipper that makes him look like an extra on a cancelled Star Trek spin-off, stayed in my head longer than any dialogue spoken by anyone in the supporting cast. Hindi films have a long and glorious history of dressing their anti-heroes like refugees from a high-end Milanese apocalypse, but this particular garment felt less like a costume choice and more like an active participant in the scene-blocking, frequently catching the barrel of a pistol or blocking out a significant portion of Mahesh Manjrekar’s face during close-ups. It is a small thing, but it bugged me, mostly because the movie itself is so completely devoid of texture that you end up staring at outerwear simply to keep your eyes from glazing over entirely.

Sanjay Gupta has been making the exact same picture since the nineties, borrowing heavily from Hollywood gangster tropes and slapping a loud, hyper-saturated filter over every single frame until Bombay looks less like a bustling coastal metropolis and more like a dusty, sepia-toned hellscape designed entirely by a teenager who just discovered Quentin Tarantino. The camera swoops and pans with the frantic energy of someone trying to avoid paying attention to the actual blocking of the actors. People walk down narrow corridors while the lens tracks backward at an alarming rate, making every routine conversation feel like a tactical retreat from an approaching mortar strike. There is no rhythm to the editing room choices; sequences cut away three frames too early on reaction shots, robbing characters of whatever emotional weight they were trying to build through sheer volume and vein-bulging intensity.

John Abraham plays Amartya Rao, a man who starts the film as a mild-mannered vegetable vendor and ends it as the undisputed king of the docks, dispatching rival extortionists with the unbothered weariness of a guy standing in line at the post office. He does not act so much as he simply stands very still in tailored kurtas until someone tells him to throw a punch or stare menacingly at a stack of corrugated tin roofs. It is a performance of severe, almost comical rigidity, lacking the greasy charisma that Sanjay Dutt brought to similar roles in older Hindi movies, leaving behind only an empty suit of muscle and tailored denim. Emraan Hashmi shows up around the forty-minute mark as Vijay Savarkar, a cop with a personal vendetta and a penchant for wearing aviators indoors, which he apparently feels adds some necessary grit to his interrogations.

Hashmi tries his absolute best to inject some pulse into a script that reads like a Wikipedia summary of every major gang war that ever bloodied the streets of Bombay, chewing on his toothpicks and barking orders with a raspy urgency that occasionally cuts through the din of the sound design. He and Abraham share a couple of cat-and-mouse scenes that almost work, mostly because Hashmi brings a frantic, unpredictable energy to the table that completely throws off Abraham’s stoic, granite-faced routine. But the screenplay refuses to let them breathe, rushing from one bloody street execution to the next without ever establishing why we should care about either of these men or the patch of concrete they are fighting over. We get scene after scene of men in crisp white shirts shouting exposition at each other in cavernous warehouses that echo with every heavy footstep.

The soundtrack is a relentless wall of thumping bass and screeching electric guitars that kicks in every time someone picks up a telephone or looks thoughtfully out a rain-streaked window. It tries to manufacture stakes where none exist, drowning out the few moments of quiet drama that might have allowed the human beings on screen to feel like actual people rather than action figures being smashed together by a distracted toddler. The supporting cast is packed with reliable character actors who mostly stand around in the background looking concerned while the leads posture, occasionally stepping forward to deliver a threatening one-liner before retreating into the shadows to let the guns do the talking. Mahesh Manjrekar plays a wheelchair-bound politician with the exact same raspy growl he has used in half a dozen other gangster pictures, making you wish for a bit more range or at least a different chair.

Looking at Mumbai Saga alongside something like Shootout at Lokhandwala reveals just how much the genre has hollowed itself out over the last decade, trading messy human mess and chaotic momentum for sterile, airbrushed posturing. The grit here is entirely digital, applied with a software brush rather than earned through performance or narrative risk. It is a loud, exhausting exercise in nostalgia for an era of crime cinema that was already derivative to begin with, offering neither the trashy joy of late-night guilty pleasures nor the sharp socio-political commentary it occasionally tries to gesture toward between gunfights. By the time the final confrontation rolls around on a rain-slicked dock that looks like it was rented for four hours on a Tuesday, you stop caring who gets shot and just start wondering how many more times that beige jacket is going to catch on a doorframe.